Poll: Health exchange rollout gets poor reviews

The Census estimates that about 48 million Americans lacked coverage in 2012, or more than 15 percent of the population.

Starting next year, the law requires virtually all Americans to have insurance or face a tax penalty after a coverage gap of three months.

Opinions are sharply divided on the overall framework of the law: 28 percent of Americans support it, 38 percent are opposed, and 32 percent don’t have an opinion either way, the poll found. When asked specifically whether the government should be able to require all Americans to buy insurance or face a fine, only about 3 in 10 Americans agreed, and 68 percent were opposed.

The AP-GfK Poll was conducted Oct. 3-7 using KnowledgePanel, GfK’s probability-based online panel. It involved online interviews with 1,227 adults. The survey has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points for all respondents. For results among the 76 respondents who attempted to use health insurance markets, the margin of error is plus or minus 13.5 percentage points.